I HATE APPLE

also it was weird how they rattled off all this almost-legalese "you're holding it wrong" type language followed by "i hope you're very satisfied with my service" and "thanks for being in the apple family!!" uh okay.

i mean i contacted apple to see whether there was a known problem (e.g. the iphone 6 is shit with bluetooth) or whether there was an easy fix. i absolutely did not expect a "you're holding it wrong" type solution. that's the second time i've ever had a duff interaction with apple (the first was when their philippines call centre told me compulsory compliance with australian consumer law was a "one-time" special favour).

ugh

oh hey my whole music library on my iphone disappeared, that's cool

I think this basically right (Is Apple intentionally slowing down your old iPhone? The data suggests not) in saying that the core OS isn't crippled by successive updates as the phone gets older, but the point about third-party apps isn't given enough weight.

It takes Facebook, Twitter and Citymapper far, far longer to launch than just a few months ago on my 6. What I'd like is granularity in the update schedule for apps: I'm fine with allowing automatic updates on the dozens of apps I own that I don't need regular, quick access to, but I'd like those three, for example, to just switch to manual updates for those three apps once my phone model is, say, two years past its release date, as that seems to be when things start really slowing down.

Mitigating strategies: using Tweetbot (launches really fast, but doesn't handle nu-Twitter well), ditching Facebook app for a homescreen link to the website, using Citymapper's set of widgets.

I guess webpage load times creeping up has also been a big factor in phones getting slower to use, but in the media, at least that has been somewhat addressed recently with AMP, instant articles and the like.

yeah i agree (apart from ios 11 which is a hulking bag of shit), increasingly demanding apps are a huge part of the reason things slow down over time. ios 10 was pretty good on day one, but by august most of what i used was laggy as hell.

yeah - I turn off automatic updates after a year on any new device

i contacted apple again re the airpods and spoke to someone else who was MUCH better. he agreed the airpods should work in my pocket, agreed they should have a range longer than 3 feet, said they sound faulty to him, and suggested i get them replaced. mh was right (which i didn't doubt btw, was just hoping to avoid the hassle of going back to the shop).

Pro tip: delete Facebook

the replacement airpods are definitely better. i think the right one was dodgy because my phone put a big red x (or !) next to it a couple of times.

i did have an issue with dropouts at home, but it turned out to be a bluetooth subwoofer i'd forgotten to turn off that was screaming for a soundbar and basically jamming everything else.

in summary, i don't hate apple and am effectively derailing a quality thread

"iTunes could not connect to the iPad “~~~~~~~” because it is locked with a passcode. You must enter your passcode on the iPad before it can be used with iTunes."

since i turned on wifi sync, i get this error message every time my ipad goes to "sleep", which is like every five minutes

short of removing the passcode, anyone know how to fix this?

far more app crashes under 11.0.2, definitely

― rove mcmanus island (Autumn Almanac), Thursday, October 5, 2017 1:26 AM (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thanks. I’ll wait for .3 to appear.

― willem, Thursday, October 5, 2017 1:44 AM (two weeks ago)

What's the verdict on .3?

Works fine. No app crashes (but I have a very limited number of apps I regularly use). Battery life as it was with .1.

Was just thinking that .3 seemed fine then Zing crashed twice while trying to post

Zing a bit crashy for me still on 10.whatever so that might not be the reason

11.0.3 has been better than 11.0.2, but on my 6 i still had occasional app crashes, horrible battery and slow-as-fuck camera response. better battery and camera on my new 8+ but app crashes remain.

11.1 beta 4 came out yesterday, and because 11.1 contains a krack fix i assume apple wants it on devices quickly, so you might as well wait another day or two for that.

"This is not an issue, it's a feature"

If you quickly type 1 + 2 + 3 on your iOS 11 stock calculator, do you get 6 or 24?

lol what - 24. It seems like it doesn't register the "+" in the "2+3" sequence quick enough?

ios11 I truly an embarrassment of glitches

The calculator thing happens on iOS 10 also, it's been broken. But I use PCalc, which I might as well plug here since it's great.

OTM PCalc is the business

i thought this was the best time ever for apple products?

reassuring thread

It becomes clearer every day that Apple shipped #APFS way too early. https://t.co/UncYf7XaSs

— Felix Schwarz (@felix_schwarz) October 5, 2017

I'm glad I've resisted my usual urge to update the os right away

that was a pretty bad botch, but that's from late september and apple already patched and fixed that

it's not even an APFS problem, it's a problem they introduced in the password management dialog for disk encryption

someone managed to screw up the code that takes the password and hint, and ended up using the password variable where they should have put the hint variable

whoopsy

the specific bug is not a show stopper but it's embarrassingly prominent enough, and part of a pattern, that suggests they're either not testing enough, don't care enough or are rushing.

also the space bar doesn't work on their flagship computer

fair

it's not an indictment of APFS, though!

my 6s touchscreen has been acting really weird since the update

seems like apple is trying to blame it on third party screen replacement

which is weird since i got my phone refurbished from t-mobile, i would figure they'd use parts approved by apple

xp no afaict the FS is fine in the abstract.

but the FS interacts with userland, and every time it does it inspires no confidence.

and the difficult time low level fs devs have had with with APFS itself (e.g. read back through http://www.shirt-pocket.com/blog/index.php/shadedgrey/C5/) suggests there is, at best, a lack of documentation and communication that doesn't bode well for their bandwidth to solve bigger problems.

i've been using osx since the public beta. i know things have never been perfect. and the situation has been worse than it is now. but the software situation is getting worse, and the hardware situation is not good (and the mac line is a disaster).

random selection from the last ~20 or so posts on michael tsai's blog

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2017/10/20/an-important-part-of-our-product-line-going-forward/
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2017/10/19/the-sad-state-of-ios-11s-tv-app/
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2017/10/19/you-cant-turn-off-spotlight-on-your-time-machine-backup/
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2017/10/18/unreliable-macbook-pro-keyboards/
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2017/10/17/how-icloud-drive-can-break-time-machine-backups/
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2017/10/14/the-impossible-dream-of-usb-c/
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2017/10/12/apfs-and-institutional-recovery-keys/

apple is making some huge mistakes. i don't know what i'd do if my 2012 macbook pro died and i needed to replace it. the new macbooks are so unattractive maybe i'd just say fuck it and go back to using a PC (something i haven't done since my sophomore year of college).

at a conference this weekend I was chairing a session & needed to find a laptop to hook up to the projector. someone offered a new macbook but the normal method of copying slides from people's usb keys (which speakers were naturally prepared to do) wouldn't work bc evidently the new macbook doesn't take usb unless you have an adaptor?

otm the mac line needs some serious work, should have kept at the least one legacy USB port

but yeah Euler, it has a USB port, but it's type C, whereas nearly every device that's not a screwed up camera or cell phone uses A

'A' completely sucks in its own ways but it's the ad hoc standard because memory sticks are ubiquitous

wow yeah that's nuts, do they know/care how much people use usb keys?

I'm on board with smaller / thinner but a usb port's a lot different than e.g. a parallel port

the answer was, apparently, no

xp i'm unhappy enough with this new macbook pro that i've been looking at dell xps and precision laptops but i find the build process extremely confusing

i use my usb port every single day. i use it to backup my computer, i use to plug in my gaming controller, i use it to add books to my kindle, or charge a device. i really do not understand what they thinking by eliminating it.

tbf to apple w/r/t usb sticks i think they (rightly) believe that they are on their way out, given that nowadays most people are on wifi with gmail or stuff is on a shared drive or they can airdrop etc

all of the other laptop makers still pretty much suck in their own ways. my work one is a Dell one and I'd rate it as checking all the boxes of what I need, but it'd sure be nice if it had the high DPI screen and trackpad of a Mac

the market seems to be half tablet-like laptops with high resolution screens, sometimes with touch control, and shitty keyboard/trackpads. the other half is trad laptops with relatively low resolution screens and boxy-ass designs

at conferences not everyone has eduroam so we have to deal with asking for temp permission to them to get wifi; usually speakers are international so they don't necessarily have 3/4g access either, and anyway they'd have to tether their laptops...it's such a hassle when we can just pop in the usb key instead.

my kids in hs/middle school use their usb keys daily bc the computer labs at school require them---they don't have "shared cloud space" or whatever. then they work on stuff at home and bring it back to school on their keys. gmail won't replace this.

I still don't know what the use situation for airdrop is

people said the exact same things about floppy drives, honestly, they always do this xxps

the best overall feature set on a Windows laptop is probably the Microsoft ones, which brings up a lot of philosophical questions

I think comparing the usb problem to the floppy drive is exactly what Apple's mindset was, and I think it's not a good comparison

I think ditching usb was fine. The problem is that the usb-c peripheral market is a disaster.

anyway I use my personal laptop at home for maybe 30 minutes a week at this point, Macs are basically a work concern for me, which means I don't care as much